I was so excited to win this book in a Goodreads giveaway. The story sounded like it would be very interesting. I might be against popular belief here, but I found it a very blah. I read 92 pages and haven't been super impressed or intrigued, so I'm putting the book down for good and moving on. I'm not going to finish it.

“I can sense how closely death is nipping at my heels. It’s just a matter of being faster”. P146

The Passenger is a relentless, urgent, foreboding read, written in the wake of the November 1938, Kristallnacht and November Pogroms when violent acts, signalling the Nazi intent, were committed against Jews. Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz penned this tale in a feverish four weeks following these events, three years after he had escaped Germany in 1935. Boschwitz made his way to England, only to be interned as an “enemy alien” on the Isle of Man with thousands of Jewish refugees, once the war broke out. Intriguingly, an early version of this book was published in England and France at the time, essentially going unnoticed, until a manuscript was uncovered in Frankfurt, in the German Exile Archive of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. While the manuscript had been housed in Frankfurt from 1960, its significance and subsequent edited version was not realised until 2015.

Otto Silbermann is the passenger, a Jewish German man who finds himself suddenly ‘on the run’, trying to make sense of what he has become in his own country. The story is written in the first person and Boschwitz has given voice to the incredulous occurrences of the time through the thoughts and actions of Silbermann. Set over a few days in November 1938, Silbermann spends the majority of his time on the trains, criss-crossing Germany in an effort to work out what to do and to comprehend what he has become.

“The fact is that I have already emigrated … to the Deutsche Reichsbahn. i am no longer in Germany. I am in trains that run through Germany. That’s a big difference.” P148

Silbermann’s thoughts read like their own narrative and much of what he is thinking concerns the fact that he has become an enemy for no reason, that those who were his friends, colleagues are no more, or are looking at him differently. Racial identity becomes paramount and Silbermann is only able to travel on the trains because he looks Aryan as opposed to Jewish.

“Whatever I’ve done in the past, he thought, looks different today than it did back then, because now my humanity is called into question, because I am a Jew”. P203

There is something ultimately hopeless in this sobering read, especially as in 2024, I know the ending, I know what happened, and to read this as the darkness was descending on Europe, not even 100 years ago, makes for an incredulous and frankly, quite unbelievable and critically important read.

However, this is not just a story about Otto Silbermann and the incredible plight of the Jews. It is about the German people, those who were indifferent, those who were complicit, those who were opportunistic, those who were sympathetic. This is a tale of humanity at its rawest and worst.

Incidentally, Boschwitz, was exiled to Australia to a prison camp, only to be a passenger on the MV Abosso when it was torpedoed by a German submarine as it was making its way back to England in 1942.

This book needs to be read widely. 5 stars.

Opeens alles te verliezen, je plaats in de samenleving, je rechten, en uiteindelijk je geld. Het hoofdpersonage van dit boek is niet altijd even sympathiek maar hij is uiterst herkenbaar in wat hij het liefste wil: gewoon zijn normaal leven leiden, en niet meer reizen of vluchten.

Omwille van de thematiek is dit een aanrader, de schrijfstijl haalt naar mijn gevoel echter niet het onderste uit de kan qua emotionele impact.

(3.5 sterren)

This is an especially sad story because it mirrors the author's experience in fleeing Nazi Germany.